The Book of Air and Shadows

by Michael Gruber

  Imogen, my daughter, is thirteen. She has straw blond hair and gray eyes and looks so like her mother that she might have been budded from the maternal stem instead of being generated by the usual method. This, by the way, seems to be a peculiarity of our family. The Mishkin genes do not work and play well with others. They either dominate totally or leave the field in a huff. Thus I look exactly like my dad, the Jewish refrigerator carton, while my brother and sister are blondie rails, recruiting posters for the Hitlerjugend. My son, Nicholas, aged eleven, is an absurd little Jake. When I was courting Amalie, my sister pointed out to me that she looked exactly like a younger version of our mom. I can’t say that I ever saw it, although the coloring and general facial type is similar. German, you could say. When Uncle Paul and Aunt Miri take Imogen out, it is universally assumed that she is their daughter, while when I am with her the average passerby gives us unfriendly looks, as if I were an abducting perve.

  As for character, unlike her mother, Imogen is a perfect Narcissus; all others exist but to worship her and if not, watch out! She is an athlete-a swimmer of some talent-and wants to be an actress, an ambition I support, for I consider her unsuited for any other life. I believe she gets this tendency from me. When I was in high school in Brooklyn, a teacher told me that I had a good voice and that I should go out for drama, and I did and got the part of Telegin in Uncle Vanya, a small role, but like all Chekhov roles it can be made memorable. I suppose that they no longer do Chekhov in Brooklyn public high schools, but then they did, along with many other cultural activities that are no longer possible in this current age of brass. Telegin is called Waffles in the play because his face is pocked, and mine at sixteen was a mess too. My big line was “I have forfeited my happiness but I have kept my pride.” Naturally, I fell in love with Gloria Gottleib, who played Sonia and who didn’t know I was alive, etc., but the interesting thing was that even after I was offstage and even after we’d done our three performances in the orange-juice-smelling auditorium, I still felt inhabited by Telegin, and this was wonderful to me, that a made-up person created by a man long dead could in a sense displace my own personality.

  I should mention here that until I appeared in this thing I had been a miserable figure, too obscure even to be a butt of mockery. It is relatively easy to disappear in a large urban high school, but I had special reasons for becoming one with the tan tiles of the wall. I was a Catholic kid with a Jewish name and a Nazi grandfather in a school where the aristocracy was intellectual and almost entirely Jewish, plus Izzy the Book, was not unknown to the tabloids at the time as oft indicted, never convicted. I lived in terror of someone (i.e., Gloria Gottleib) making the connection. On top of this, my brother Paul, two years older, was a thug. He announced this, as thugs did then, with the black leather jacket and the collar up in back and the duck’s ass hairdo. Being a nonentity was preferable to being famous as Paulie Mishkin’s brother. At some level I knew that I was protected by his ferocious aura from the light bullying that would’ve been my fate otherwise. Paul insisted that when I got pounded, which was fairly often, the pounder would be him only. The worst fight I ever saw when I was growing up was Paul taking out two guys from a well-known street-fighting gang who had mugged my lunch money on the way to school. He used a brick.

  These obsessive images. That’s not what I want to write down at all, although perhaps it’s significant that after this fight, and Paul’s suspension from school as a result, was when I started serious lifting. I resolved not to have to depend on him to stick up for me, and further, I supposed that if I became a moose I could avoid fights. Little did I know.

  In any case, after Uncle Vanya I made a terrific ass of myself by more or less staying in character perpetually, wearing an antique brocade vest I found in a junk shop, speaking with a slight accent, pretending to have to reach for an English word, mumbling in what I imagined sounded like Russian. I became somewhat more popular, as amusing lunatics sometimes do, and I began to get invitations to high-end parties thrown by the popular Jewish girls. The next play we did was Romeo and Juliet and I was Mercutio. The fit with him was much better than with Telegin, for to fill the harmless air with witty nonsense, strike antic poses, and absurdly die seems glorious to the young; nor is it o’er taxing to speak, like this, in rich and flowing iambs, till all about you wish you dead. For the teenaged boy playing Mercutio the hard part is to speak the dirty stuff without cracking up, all that business about pricks in act I, scene iv, for example, may be even harder than doing a convincing job as Romeo. As for Juliet…you know, speaking as an IP lawyer, I would say that Shakespeare’s famous powers of invention do not show well in the matter of plots. All but two of the plays are ripped off, sometimes blatantly, from prior sources; and it was a good thing for him they didn’t have copyright in those days. We go to hear his plays for the language, just as we go to opera for the music; plot is secondary in both, trivial really, but-and contemporaries picked this up as well-there is no one like him for seizing something out of life and putting it on the stage. Such a coup is the end of act II, scene ii. This is the famous balcony scene, and I don’t mean the front part that everyone quotes but the depiction of a love-mad child at the end. An adult playing it-Claire Bloom perhaps-can’t help but seem absurd, but a sixteen-year-old can make it live, especially if one is in love with the girl, as I was, and I recall very distinctly the moment when, as I watched the divine Miss Gottleib draw out the long goodbye, I thought to myself this is the life for me, this is my destiny, to open my being to genius, to be possessed, to be free of my miserable self.

  This was my junior year in high school, a year that marked the beginning of the long twilight of the mob in New York. In that era, before the code of silence collapsed with Mr. Valachi, the best way to put a big-shot Italian away was to get him for tax violations, and my dad was therefore right in the crosshairs. As usual, they had him on numerous charges and were putting on the pressure to make him testify against his employers. Had they taken time to consult his family they would not have thus confused him with someone lacking moxie. All during the fall of that year, while we rehearsed R &J, Dad was on trial in federal court for the southern district of New York. While we had never been what you could call a happy household, this period was especially grim.

  Let me here touch briefly upon the family drama. Izzy and Ermentrude continued as they had begun, at gunpoint (at least metaphorically), although I believe they believed they were in love, this defined as the continued attempt to bend the beloved to one’s own will. Here is the tableau that sticks in my mind. It is evening. We boys are prepubescent, perhaps I am eight, Paul is ten, the girl is six. We have dutifully done our homework and had it inspected by Obersturmbannführer-Mutti. The air is redolent with heavy Teutonic cookery. This is still the time of alles in ordnung, before the discovery of That Whore, his mistress, after which our mom more or less gave up on life for a while. We are perhaps watching a small-screen colorless television, perhaps arguing over which channel to watch. Growing tension as six o’clock comes and goes. Will he appear? Will he be in a good mood or not? Six-thirty, and Mutti is banging pots and slamming drawers, and muttering in German. We listen for the clink of bottle on glass. Seven o’clock. A smell of burning, of expensive proteins going dry, of vegetables steaming into inedible slush. We are ravenous, but none dares to enter the kitchen.

  Seven-fifteen and the door opens. Our hearts sink when we see his face. No little gifties for the kids tonight, no hearty hi-ho Silvers for the boys, no snatchings up of the little girl and whirlings-around. No, tonight we go straight to the table, and the ruined dinner is flung thumping and clattering on the board, and my father says I’m not gonna eat this shit, and then they get into it, back and forth, in English and then demotic German, in which, even if we can’t follow the exact meaning, the violence is perfectly apparent, and then the platters and cutlery start flying, and Miriam ducks under the table and I follow, holding her little weeping head to my chest. Paul stays upright in his ch
air, and I can see him from my position below, face white, white too the knuckles of the fist that clutches his table knife. The fight grows in volume, ending usually with “fucking Nazi” from him and “Jew pig” from her and then he slugs her one and leaves. Slam! And we come out again and she makes us sit up straight and finish every scrap of the inedible food while she tells us about how it was to actually starve in poor Germany, after zeh war, and zo we must finish everyting. This isn’t why we choke it down, though; it’s because what else can we do for her?

  But during the trial we didn’t do that anymore; now silence reigned. Mutti slapped warmed-up canned goods on the table and retreated into her bedroom, from which the sounds of the German classics emerged, Beethoven, Bruckner, Wagner. She started drinking more, and when she got her load on, the volume went up. Dad might kick the door down then and smash records, or he might just leave and not return for days. Paul also was rarely home. After graduating (barely) from high school he had taken to hanging out with his gang, who had also graduated (as we were shortly to learn) from petty theft to armed robbery.

  That left me to cope with the household and with my sister, Miriam, then fourteen. Miri had already developed the remarkable face she would carry into adulthood, a face whose angled planes acted like those on a stealth bomber to allow undetectable penetration deep into the heart of enemy territory, in this case, the male sex. I made no attempt to actually control her, knowing it would be futile, but I could at least ensure that she had meals and clean garments, and between me and Paulie we were successful (I believe) in discouraging the attentions of guys over thirty. One morning, just before Thanksgiving of that year, Dad did not show up in court, nor did he return home. Naturally we feared the worst, that his mob pals had lost faith in his silence (since it was fairly clear by then that he was going to go down for the top counts of the indictment unless he did a deal) and had acted to forestall this. I recall thinking of him stuffed into a weighted oil drum or resting under the asphalt of a highway and trying to feel sad, and failing.

  But he hadn’t been whacked. After a period of some weeks, the papers reported that he’d been sighted in Tel Aviv. He had skipped bail and followed his mentor, Meyer Lansky, into comfortable exile. Not a card for us, not a call. Later I heard he’d changed his name to something more Hebraic, as encouraged by the Israeli government, although I suppose there are Mishkins enough in that nation. This was all before media frenzy became the rule, and so we only had a couple of reporters come by our house, and Paulie and some of his friends beat the shit out of them, smashing cameras, etc. This was when you could beat the shit out of the press without having it captured on videotape, which made for a more civilized press, in my opinion. Since Dad had put our house and his immovable assets up to make his colossal bail, and he’d skipped with all the cash on hand, we were left essentially destitute. After a decent interval the bailiffs came and took Dad’s Caddy and served us with eviction papers.

  At this point we had a small miracle. I awoke one Saturday morning to the sound of strenuous packing and Parsifal on the stereo. Mutti was back, in charge, shouting orders. We kids were marshaled into action, as well as two guys I’d never seen before, German speakers, probably war criminals in hiding that Mutti had dug up somewhere. It was Regensburg 1945 again, Hitler was gone, the Reds were coming, and life had to be whipped into shape from the ruins. I understand that Ukrainian villages cheered the arrival of the Nazis in 1941, and we kids were in somewhat the same state-anything had to be better than what we’d recently experienced, and maternal fascism was at least a known quantity. The Germans had a truck too, and it moved us from our comfortable brick house in Flatbush to a cramped two-bedroom in a high-rise public project out by the Queens borderline.

  So our lives continued without Dad. The salary from the job Mutti obtained as a clerk at King’s County Hospital was just enough to keep us in underwear and bratwurst. We kids thereafter devoted ourselves to living the lives we thought would most piss Dad off: Paul became a stupid rather than a clever criminal; I became a star student (i.e., a schmuck); and Miri, not to mince words, became a slut. In short order, Paul got nailed for a liquor store holdup and went off for his jolt upstate, Miri ran off with a playboy, and I graduated with honors, aced my SATs, and went to Columbia, where I met Mickey Haas. I hope this connects all the dots.

  But I started this long digression by describing my children, and I see I have not yet said anything about my son, Nicholas-Niko, as we call him. For a long time we thought, or rather I thought, that there was something wrong with Niko, some form of autism perhaps, or one of the other childhood syndromes lately invented to provide the drug companies with fresh markets. He failed to walk or talk at the usual times, and I insisted on taking him to various specialists, although his mother maintained that there was nothing seriously wrong with him. In time, his mother was proven correct. He began to talk at around four, and from the start in perfect paragraphs, and demonstrated at around the same time that he had taught himself to read. He is some kind of prodigy, but we’re not really sure what kind. I admit now that I have never felt entirely comfortable in his presence. To my shame. When he was six, before our home dissolved, he used to come into the little room that I used as a study or den and stand staring at me and would say nothing at all when I asked him what he wanted. Eventually, I used to ignore his presence, or try to. I imagined sometimes that he could see into me, into my deepest thoughts and desires, and that he, alone of my family, knew then how perfectly rotten I was.

  He goes to Copley Academy with Imogen and has special tutoring in mathematics and computer science, at both of which he excels. Izzy the Book thus struck, in a fashion, across the generations, skipping me, for I never received more than a B- in the few math courses my education required. Niko is a solid, grave little man, and in his features he has already started to resemble his paternal grandfather, the dark, canny, opaque eyes, the schnoz, the wide mouth, the thick curling dark hair. As far as I know, he has never learned anything from me. The last time I tried it was at the pool, when I attempted to teach him to swim. Not only did I fail, but my efforts sent him into a hysteria so profound and long lasting that no one has ever tried to teach him again, and he remains a terrified sinker. On land I suppose he is reasonably happy; Copley is the kind of place where, if you are not disruptive, they leave you alone. They don’t give out grades, and they charge twenty-eight-five a year. I don’t begrudge this in the least, as I make a good living. I bill on average seven-fifty an hour, and my annual billings are usually well in excess of two thousand hours per annum. You may do the math. I have no expensive hobbies (or only one, I should say), I dislike travel, and I have moderate tastes. I bought a loft in Tribeca before the prices went nuts, and Amalie also leads a fairly simple life and has a substantial income of her own, although given free rein she would surrender our entire substance to the poor and suffering and live with the children under an elevated highway instead of in a nice brownstone on East Seventy-Sixth Street.

  I love my children as much as I love anything, which I have to say is not all that much. I am able to maintain the simulacrum of a good father simply as an act of imagination, as previously I maintained that of a good son, a good brother, a friend, and so on. It is more easy than you might think to fool people, and until I met Amalie I thought everyone was like that, I thought people picked a script from a cultural box and played it out, I thought that, really, there was no difference between Jake Mishkin playing Mercutio and Jake Mishkin playing Jake Mishkin, except that Mercutio was better written.

  That was, by the way, why I didn’t go into acting professionally. I told myself that I gave up the theater (and what a gross self-pitying phrase that sounds!) because I required a sure source of income to support my family, but in fact it was because once I got into a part it was nearly impossible for me to get out of it. What was funny-eccentric in high school became funny-peculiar when I got a little older, and then not funny at all. I imagined myself spending my days in a
locked ward, stuck in Macbeth or Torvald Helmer. Or Estragon. And there was also, I don’t know, something seriously toxic about the people who were involved with theater, or maybe I just projected that because I was scared. So I switched to prelaw and have had little reason to regret it since. I don’t go to plays.

  I’ve returned after a break to drink some coffee and have a doughnut. I bought two dozen at a place in Saranac Lake and have been living off them and coffee for some time. The house is well stocked with canned goods and staples, some of them of considerable age, and there is a freezer with fish and game in it. Mickey said I could stay here indefinitely, although he added that in the event of a nuclear attack I would have to share it with him and whichever of his three wives he decides to bring along. There is a town twenty-six miles off, New Weimar, but I have not visited it. I thought it best if no one local knew I was here. The house is quite isolated, standing at the end of a long dirt driveway that comes off a gravel road, that diverges from a secondary state road that comes off Route 30 west of Saranac Lake. The isolation is purely physical, however, for some years ago Mickey installed a satellite dish, and so you can get the usual two hundred channels, and more significantly there is broadband Internet access via the dish. I like to feel that with a few button pushes I can send this out to the whole world. This may be a bargaining chip at some point, with whom I don’t yet know.

  Reading this over I see I have screwed up the line of the narrative beyond all repair. It might have been better had I simply set out to write out my life story straight up, as if, like Bracegirdle, I were on my deathbed, instead of merely dwelling in the probability of meeting some violent end in the not-too-distant future. Death, I suppose, concentrates the mind, assuming one has a mind left. The problem is that I started out to tell a simple story like you used to find in cheap thrillers, the electronic equivalent of the last-gasp message, the cryptic scrawl on the plaster, the note in blood-“the emeralds are in the p [illegible scrawl]”; or “It wasn’t Har.” And from this arises the plot. But it seems that my life has become mixed up with the story, as was Bracegirdle’s, viz.: